If you want to find out more about the enigmatic Drif and his infamous Guide, there's a fascinating piece here...
http://lucymelford.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/drif-field-raymond-carver-and-infamous.html#comment-form
Monday, 9 January 2017
His Girl Friday
The other evening I watched the classic 'screwball' comedy His Girl Friday again. I've seen this adaptation of Hecht and MacArthur's The Front Page (with that one inspired change - a female Hildy) maybe half a dozen times over the years, and it still comes up fresh and funny with every viewing. The dialogue in particular is so rich, dense and phenomenally fast-moving that it just goes on giving - there's always going to be some little gem you missed the last time.
Whenever Cary Grant (playing editor Walter Burns) and Rosalind Russell (playing Hildy Johnson, ace reporter and Walter's ex-wife) are together, the dialogue fizzes and crackles, careering along at breakneck speed, lines constantly overlapping or being left unfinished. Grant was often ad-libbing, while Russell would throw in lines she'd had written for her to liven things up, so both actors were on their toes throughout, and the exhilaration of working like this (encouraged by Hawks) brought out the best in them.
It was in The Front Page that the comic persona Grant developed in The Awful Truth achieved perfection - and he had the perfect on-screen partner in Rosalind Russell. She, however, was far from first choice for the part (more like sixth or seventh), and director Howard Hawks initially seemed none too keen to have her. It surely can't have taken him long to realise that he had struck gold - Grant and Russell were a partnership made in movie heaven, and she was a revelation. Not only did the two of them give all-time great performances, they did it with effortless aplomb and masses of style, the latter enhanced by their quite fabulous costumes - Hildy's raffish hat, Walter's impeccable suits (Grant is one of those rare men who can wear a double-breasted suit with absolute conviction).
In one of its most spectacular displays of obtuseness, the Academy entirely ignored His Girl Friday when Oscars time came round - not so much as a nomination, for Grant, for Russell, for Hawks, for anyone. Indeed Cary Grant, the finest comic actor of his generation, had only two Oscar nods in his entire career - neither of them for a comic role - and had to wait until 1970 for a belated honorary award, his only Oscar. He accepted it, of course, with good grace.
Whenever Cary Grant (playing editor Walter Burns) and Rosalind Russell (playing Hildy Johnson, ace reporter and Walter's ex-wife) are together, the dialogue fizzes and crackles, careering along at breakneck speed, lines constantly overlapping or being left unfinished. Grant was often ad-libbing, while Russell would throw in lines she'd had written for her to liven things up, so both actors were on their toes throughout, and the exhilaration of working like this (encouraged by Hawks) brought out the best in them.
It was in The Front Page that the comic persona Grant developed in The Awful Truth achieved perfection - and he had the perfect on-screen partner in Rosalind Russell. She, however, was far from first choice for the part (more like sixth or seventh), and director Howard Hawks initially seemed none too keen to have her. It surely can't have taken him long to realise that he had struck gold - Grant and Russell were a partnership made in movie heaven, and she was a revelation. Not only did the two of them give all-time great performances, they did it with effortless aplomb and masses of style, the latter enhanced by their quite fabulous costumes - Hildy's raffish hat, Walter's impeccable suits (Grant is one of those rare men who can wear a double-breasted suit with absolute conviction).
In one of its most spectacular displays of obtuseness, the Academy entirely ignored His Girl Friday when Oscars time came round - not so much as a nomination, for Grant, for Russell, for Hawks, for anyone. Indeed Cary Grant, the finest comic actor of his generation, had only two Oscar nods in his entire career - neither of them for a comic role - and had to wait until 1970 for a belated honorary award, his only Oscar. He accepted it, of course, with good grace.
Sunday, 8 January 2017
The Basil Fawlty of Booksellers - and the Enigmatic Driff
It's good to know that there are still curmudgeonly booksellers around - you might have thought the second-hand book business was too precarious for shopowners to indulge the profound misanthropy that tends to go with the job. This chap in the Yorkshire town of Hawes - the 'Basil Fawlty of booksellers' - has been in the papers this week, and good luck to him, I say: partly because anyone obliged to deal with the 'general public' on a daily basis has my sympathy, but also because one of the pleasures of second-hand book buying (or browsing) is that, when you open the door of an unfamiliar bookshop, you never know what you're going to find - and that applies as much to the bookseller as the stock. It's perhaps the last wholly unpredictable retail experience left to us in an increasingly standardised world. There are even some perfectly amiable, socially functioning booksellers (e.g. the owner of The Bookshop in Wirksworth) - they are not all 'men of a certain age who had been disappointed in life. Books were their only solace - friends who never let you down.'
That sweeping characterisation was written by the book trade legend known as Driff Field, or Drif, or Driffield, or Dryfield, or even Dryfeld. An enigmatic figure, he achieved notoriety (and something dangerously like success) in the Eighties with his self-published guide to All the Secondhand and Antiquarian Bookshops in Britain, a uniquely exhaustive, frank and often scathing assessment of each and very shop, often including a little pen portrait of the owner: 'Owner has been unwell recently with bad back (possibly caused by turning it on the customers once too often).' The guide was actually a very useful tool in those pre-internet days, when hunting down books was a hard slog, and the entries pack a lot of information into few words: 'V. erratic but will answer if you ring bell. Med sz low key Nat Hist bk shp. Farts. Rumoured to be closing down.'
A book trade 'runner' with an uncanny eye for rarities, Driff was a tall, dark man who fancied he looked like Raymond Carver - indeed he used a picture of Carver as his author photo. He had a habit of walking into a shop, looming over the unfortunate owner sitting at his desk, letting a tense silence build, then asking, 'Do you have any books on death?'
Driff appears as a character in Iain Sinclair's White Chapell, Scarlet Tracings, and pops up in several of Sinclair's later works. He also made an appearance in The Cardinal and the Corpse, an 'occult documentary' made for Channel 4 by Chris Petit that seems to have sunk without trace. Driff, playing himself, was determined to prove that a pulp novel called The Cardinal and the Corpse was written pseudonymously by Flann O'Brien (or rather Brian O'Nolan).
Enigmatic to the end, Driff disappeared some years ago, and no one knows even whether he is alive or dead.
That sweeping characterisation was written by the book trade legend known as Driff Field, or Drif, or Driffield, or Dryfield, or even Dryfeld. An enigmatic figure, he achieved notoriety (and something dangerously like success) in the Eighties with his self-published guide to All the Secondhand and Antiquarian Bookshops in Britain, a uniquely exhaustive, frank and often scathing assessment of each and very shop, often including a little pen portrait of the owner: 'Owner has been unwell recently with bad back (possibly caused by turning it on the customers once too often).' The guide was actually a very useful tool in those pre-internet days, when hunting down books was a hard slog, and the entries pack a lot of information into few words: 'V. erratic but will answer if you ring bell. Med sz low key Nat Hist bk shp. Farts. Rumoured to be closing down.'
A book trade 'runner' with an uncanny eye for rarities, Driff was a tall, dark man who fancied he looked like Raymond Carver - indeed he used a picture of Carver as his author photo. He had a habit of walking into a shop, looming over the unfortunate owner sitting at his desk, letting a tense silence build, then asking, 'Do you have any books on death?'
Driff appears as a character in Iain Sinclair's White Chapell, Scarlet Tracings, and pops up in several of Sinclair's later works. He also made an appearance in The Cardinal and the Corpse, an 'occult documentary' made for Channel 4 by Chris Petit that seems to have sunk without trace. Driff, playing himself, was determined to prove that a pulp novel called The Cardinal and the Corpse was written pseudonymously by Flann O'Brien (or rather Brian O'Nolan).
Enigmatic to the end, Driff disappeared some years ago, and no one knows even whether he is alive or dead.
Friday, 6 January 2017
'I could feel the charger about my person...'
A chap can't have too many pockets, I say - at least in his jacket. I'm always pleasantly surprised when I find a jacket that can comfortably accommodate my essentials in appropriately shaped and placed pockets - my essentials being bank cards and such, codgercards (Freedom Pass, senior rail card etc), Victorinox Swiss Card classic (incorporating scissors, pen knife, nail file/screwdriver, tweezers, toothpick, emergency pen and 3" ruler), diary, notebook, smartphone and dumbphone, pen and reading glasses. That's a lot to carry, so clearly I need plenty of pocket space. However, having read this amusing piece on the BBC News website, I appreciate that it is indeed possible to have Too Many Pockets.
Reporting from Las Vegas, Zoe Kleinman presents... the 42-pocket jacket! Actually it's not a jacket - it's that terrible thing, a gilet - and that's where the problems start. 'If style isn't necessarily your number one priority,' says a spokesman, setting more alarm bells ringing, 'you could fit everything you ever need in there.' But - and here's another rub - 'the firm does not recommend using all 42 pockets at once'. To judge by Kleinman's account of trying to do just that, the warning is well placed. Having nearly been pulled over backwards by the weight of her laptop in a back (literally) pocket, she managed to adapt and lumber about heavily for a while, but when it came to getting everything out of those pockets, it was far from plain sailing: 'I could feel the charger about my person but it took me a while to locate the pocket it was in.' Happily, each garment contains a little map to help you to find your way round the pockets.
That, clearly, is a case of too many pockets - far too many. However, the rival product mentioned, with a mere 25 pockets, looks more promising - and it's actually a jacket, not a gilet...
'I can't believe I've come to Las Vegas to write about pockets,' Kleinman concludes. Well, all I can say is I'm glad someone is.
Reporting from Las Vegas, Zoe Kleinman presents... the 42-pocket jacket! Actually it's not a jacket - it's that terrible thing, a gilet - and that's where the problems start. 'If style isn't necessarily your number one priority,' says a spokesman, setting more alarm bells ringing, 'you could fit everything you ever need in there.' But - and here's another rub - 'the firm does not recommend using all 42 pockets at once'. To judge by Kleinman's account of trying to do just that, the warning is well placed. Having nearly been pulled over backwards by the weight of her laptop in a back (literally) pocket, she managed to adapt and lumber about heavily for a while, but when it came to getting everything out of those pockets, it was far from plain sailing: 'I could feel the charger about my person but it took me a while to locate the pocket it was in.' Happily, each garment contains a little map to help you to find your way round the pockets.
That, clearly, is a case of too many pockets - far too many. However, the rival product mentioned, with a mere 25 pockets, looks more promising - and it's actually a jacket, not a gilet...
'I can't believe I've come to Las Vegas to write about pockets,' Kleinman concludes. Well, all I can say is I'm glad someone is.
Wednesday, 4 January 2017
Paper Dennett
Christmas may be over, but here's a gift that goes on giving - your very own paper Daniel Dennett! Imagine having this little chap on your desk, with his jutting beard and paunch, silently reproaching you 24/7 for your lazy thinking, your illusory beliefs, your lamentable all-round failure to be Daniel Dennett. What do you mean, pass me those scissors?
Tuesday, 3 January 2017
How to Accept an Oscar
Accepting the award from Ingrid Bergman at the 1945 ceremony, an ill-at-ease Milland gave one of the shortest acceptance speeches in the history of the Oscars - you can see it here in its entirety (along with other highlights of the ceremony). If only acceptance speeches were like that these days - though it has to be said that as recently as 1991 Joe Pesci managed something even shorter: 'It's my privilege. Thank you.'
Monday, 2 January 2017
The Winner of Sorrow
I've mentioned it in passing (here), but now that I've finished reading it, it's time to say a little more about Brian Lynch's The Winner of Sorrow.
This novel takes us into the world of William Cowper, an 18th-century poet whose large output of well-wrought verse brought him fame in his day - and great popularity through the Victorian era - but is for the most part unread now. That it contains much that is well worth reading - and some that simply takes the breath away - is a fact known only to those who have made the effort to engage with this unfashionable (and, admittedly, sometimes pedestrian) poet.
But who was William Cowper? The first paragraph of The Winner of Sorrow introduces us to the poet in old age and tells us right away what we need to know:
'It was the first day of a new century and in East Dereham the Christians were going to church. Amongst them, but not of them, was an old man, William Cowper, who believed in Christ and his infinite mercy, although he was also convinced that God hated him personally and was intent on sending him to hell, soon, for all eternity. That the belief and the conviction contradicted each other he understood clearly. He understood, too, that he was completely insane, or rather almost completely, but not quite. In the same nearly perfect way, he was sure that he had always been too contemptible to be loved by any living creature, but that loving him had destroyed the lives of four women, three wild hares and a linnet. These were passive destructions, but he had once actually killed something - he had cut the head off a big snake with a garden hoe. Apart from that, he had never been physically violent, except to himself.'
The episode with the snake is related later in the novel, with an astonished onlooker describing how Cowper decapitated the snake, which was threatening a family of kittens, then, 'while the body coiled and uncoiled upon itself and the eye in the head looked on at its own death, he flung the hoe across the yard and, crying out repeatedly 'Aaah!', kicked out with his legs and flailed his arms about as if trying to rid himself of some filthy, oozing, gluey substance'. But, by the next morning, he has made of this clearly traumatic episode an amusing bit of mock-heroic verse (The Colubriad).
This incident encapsulates the peculiar tension between Cowper the tortured, hypersensitive man-child and the polished urbanity of (most of) his verse. His contradictory character is illuminated with great skill and conviction in Lynch's novel, which, beginning in Cowper's old age, takes us looping back through his childhood and early years, with their terrible mental torments, to his retirement from the world, initially in the small town of Olney in Buckinghamshire, and his discovery of his vocation as a poet. His torments never retreat far or for long, and he fends them off initially with intense evangelicalism (under the influence of John Newton), then with an ever deeper immersion in domesticity, gardening and the care of a succession of pet animals.
All the while, as the pit of utter despair forever threatens to open under him, a widening sea of adoration grows around the poet, as a succession of women - the four women mentioned in the opening paragraph - fall under his strange spell. He has a sexual abnormality, which Lynch never quite spells out - probably a form of hermaphroditism - and is terrified of adult sexuality, as of just about everything else, but he basks happily in the quasi-maternal love of these women. The widowed Mrs Unwin is chief among them - and the most maternal - and remains with Cowper until her death, fighting off the competition ferociously and effectively.
What attracted these women, and the poet's many male devotees? Lynch's Cowper has a curious but potent charm, compounded of his brilliant conversation, his combination of sharp intellect and tender sensibility, his child-like vulnerability, frail beauty and unthreatening sexual allure. But he also had a child-like vanity (and a Skimpole-like attitude to money) and a self-serving streak that managed to work every situation to his advantage, and enabled him to play his admirers off against each other. As the story unfold, his hands remain clean in the thick of some positively barbaric psychodramas - Cowper will come so close, but no closer.
Lynch's creation of a convincing 18th-century world is pitch-perfect, with no anachronisms (as far as I could make out), dialogue that flows and seems fully of its period, and details of 18th-century provincial life touched in without drawing attention to themselves. The Winner of Sorrow is a feat of total immersion, a re-creation of a life and a world. Happily Lynch writes in the third person (and the past tense), keeping a necessary distance from Cowper's tormented consciousness, and freeing himself to create a range of fully realised characters around the poet.
This novel began life as a screenplay for television (a shame it was never produced), and its origins show in the way it proceeds episodically from scene to vivid scene. Lynch is perhaps best known as a poet, but this doesn't read like a 'poet's novel' in the pejorative sense. There is no verbal lushness here, but a rare insight into an off-kilter mind, embodied in a profusion of arresting images.
Here, to give a flavour of the writing, is Lynch's description of the death of the Reverend Unwin, the death that leaves Mrs Unwin free to devote herself to Cowper:
'On this fine Sunday morning, after he had gone about a mile from home, the Reverend Unwin gave his placid old mare her head and, as he often did on this familiar journey, began reading a book. The church steeple came into view and the horse, needing only the merest nudge from his heel, ambled off the turnpike and headed down a narrow rutted track. Plodding along between high banks of lacy cow parsley, the mare shook her head just once as a hungry cleg found its way into the velvety coolness of her ear.
Five minutes later, as they were rounding a bend, he looked up and saw a small golden-haired boy pissing figures of eight into the dust on the track. Just then the cleg found a vein in the mare's ear and pierced it. The mare reared up her great bulk and Mr Unwin was thrown off backwards.
The boy was seven years old. In one pocket of his ragged coat he had a crust of bread and a chunk of cheese wrapped in the scrap of red flannel he slept with every night. In the other pocket, because he was running away from home, he had stowed his best treasure, a glass marble, perfectly blue. He stood there for a moment, then ran off, still unbuttoned, back to his mother.
The Reverend Unwin's book, the Ars Amatoria, lay open beside a large stone, fanning its pages at the behest of the mild movements of the air. On the title page, beneath the author's name, Publius Ovidius Naso, was a speck of fresh blood.'
This is an extraordinary, gripping novel, which deserves to be much more widely known. And you don't have to take my word for it - Patrick Kurp (of Anecdotal Evidence) recommends it highly, not to mention Nuala O'Faolain, Paul Durcan, Dermot Bolger and the late Clare Boylan...
This novel takes us into the world of William Cowper, an 18th-century poet whose large output of well-wrought verse brought him fame in his day - and great popularity through the Victorian era - but is for the most part unread now. That it contains much that is well worth reading - and some that simply takes the breath away - is a fact known only to those who have made the effort to engage with this unfashionable (and, admittedly, sometimes pedestrian) poet.
But who was William Cowper? The first paragraph of The Winner of Sorrow introduces us to the poet in old age and tells us right away what we need to know:
'It was the first day of a new century and in East Dereham the Christians were going to church. Amongst them, but not of them, was an old man, William Cowper, who believed in Christ and his infinite mercy, although he was also convinced that God hated him personally and was intent on sending him to hell, soon, for all eternity. That the belief and the conviction contradicted each other he understood clearly. He understood, too, that he was completely insane, or rather almost completely, but not quite. In the same nearly perfect way, he was sure that he had always been too contemptible to be loved by any living creature, but that loving him had destroyed the lives of four women, three wild hares and a linnet. These were passive destructions, but he had once actually killed something - he had cut the head off a big snake with a garden hoe. Apart from that, he had never been physically violent, except to himself.'
The episode with the snake is related later in the novel, with an astonished onlooker describing how Cowper decapitated the snake, which was threatening a family of kittens, then, 'while the body coiled and uncoiled upon itself and the eye in the head looked on at its own death, he flung the hoe across the yard and, crying out repeatedly 'Aaah!', kicked out with his legs and flailed his arms about as if trying to rid himself of some filthy, oozing, gluey substance'. But, by the next morning, he has made of this clearly traumatic episode an amusing bit of mock-heroic verse (The Colubriad).
This incident encapsulates the peculiar tension between Cowper the tortured, hypersensitive man-child and the polished urbanity of (most of) his verse. His contradictory character is illuminated with great skill and conviction in Lynch's novel, which, beginning in Cowper's old age, takes us looping back through his childhood and early years, with their terrible mental torments, to his retirement from the world, initially in the small town of Olney in Buckinghamshire, and his discovery of his vocation as a poet. His torments never retreat far or for long, and he fends them off initially with intense evangelicalism (under the influence of John Newton), then with an ever deeper immersion in domesticity, gardening and the care of a succession of pet animals.
All the while, as the pit of utter despair forever threatens to open under him, a widening sea of adoration grows around the poet, as a succession of women - the four women mentioned in the opening paragraph - fall under his strange spell. He has a sexual abnormality, which Lynch never quite spells out - probably a form of hermaphroditism - and is terrified of adult sexuality, as of just about everything else, but he basks happily in the quasi-maternal love of these women. The widowed Mrs Unwin is chief among them - and the most maternal - and remains with Cowper until her death, fighting off the competition ferociously and effectively.
What attracted these women, and the poet's many male devotees? Lynch's Cowper has a curious but potent charm, compounded of his brilliant conversation, his combination of sharp intellect and tender sensibility, his child-like vulnerability, frail beauty and unthreatening sexual allure. But he also had a child-like vanity (and a Skimpole-like attitude to money) and a self-serving streak that managed to work every situation to his advantage, and enabled him to play his admirers off against each other. As the story unfold, his hands remain clean in the thick of some positively barbaric psychodramas - Cowper will come so close, but no closer.
Lynch's creation of a convincing 18th-century world is pitch-perfect, with no anachronisms (as far as I could make out), dialogue that flows and seems fully of its period, and details of 18th-century provincial life touched in without drawing attention to themselves. The Winner of Sorrow is a feat of total immersion, a re-creation of a life and a world. Happily Lynch writes in the third person (and the past tense), keeping a necessary distance from Cowper's tormented consciousness, and freeing himself to create a range of fully realised characters around the poet.
This novel began life as a screenplay for television (a shame it was never produced), and its origins show in the way it proceeds episodically from scene to vivid scene. Lynch is perhaps best known as a poet, but this doesn't read like a 'poet's novel' in the pejorative sense. There is no verbal lushness here, but a rare insight into an off-kilter mind, embodied in a profusion of arresting images.
Here, to give a flavour of the writing, is Lynch's description of the death of the Reverend Unwin, the death that leaves Mrs Unwin free to devote herself to Cowper:
'On this fine Sunday morning, after he had gone about a mile from home, the Reverend Unwin gave his placid old mare her head and, as he often did on this familiar journey, began reading a book. The church steeple came into view and the horse, needing only the merest nudge from his heel, ambled off the turnpike and headed down a narrow rutted track. Plodding along between high banks of lacy cow parsley, the mare shook her head just once as a hungry cleg found its way into the velvety coolness of her ear.
Five minutes later, as they were rounding a bend, he looked up and saw a small golden-haired boy pissing figures of eight into the dust on the track. Just then the cleg found a vein in the mare's ear and pierced it. The mare reared up her great bulk and Mr Unwin was thrown off backwards.
The boy was seven years old. In one pocket of his ragged coat he had a crust of bread and a chunk of cheese wrapped in the scrap of red flannel he slept with every night. In the other pocket, because he was running away from home, he had stowed his best treasure, a glass marble, perfectly blue. He stood there for a moment, then ran off, still unbuttoned, back to his mother.
The Reverend Unwin's book, the Ars Amatoria, lay open beside a large stone, fanning its pages at the behest of the mild movements of the air. On the title page, beneath the author's name, Publius Ovidius Naso, was a speck of fresh blood.'
This is an extraordinary, gripping novel, which deserves to be much more widely known. And you don't have to take my word for it - Patrick Kurp (of Anecdotal Evidence) recommends it highly, not to mention Nuala O'Faolain, Paul Durcan, Dermot Bolger and the late Clare Boylan...
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